Category: Marketing

As more of a writer than a marketer, it can be hard to talk about sales and marketing. I launched Attacked Beneath Antarctica with as much of an advertising blitz as I could afford, and then dropped the price on Against the Eldest Flame to $0.99 as a cheap way to get into the series.

So far it seems to be working. My free promotion on Against the Eldest Flame got almost 300 copies out into the wild, and that’s just the beginning. Freebies are fun, but what matters are sales and paid reads.

That’s where I’m actually seeing the benefits. Against the Eldest Flame is selling steadily; the numbers aren’t huge but they’ve been pretty constant. I’ve also been selling copies of both sequels, with Attacked Beneath Antarctica moving slightly faster than Air Pirates of Krakatoa.

It’s looking good, and now I’m getting ready to publish book 4: Giant Robots of Tunguska.

The other two books aren’t free, but I have two copies of each book to give away in return for an honest review. Just hit me up through the Contact page with your Amazon account email and I’ll gift you a copy.

Please post your reviews on Amazon.com as those reviews propagate to the other sites, but it doesn’t go the other way.

After reading this Lit Hub post on cover design, I thought it would be interesting to share the the process involved in making the cover of the first Doc Vandal adventure, Against the Eldest Flame. The big thing was that I wanted a cover that really felt like it would have been perfectly at home on a newsstand in 1937. That meant no obvious CGI figures or backgrounds; the cover needed a painted look. I’ve put the journey behind the fold because there are a number of images here.